Smarty

Lemon Juice · Smarty Pro Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 109

I was curious how the new version performs in comparison to Smarty 2 in a real-life situation so I did my own tests on a shop site. Below I will give URLs of the pages I tested along with times in seconds. While the URLs represent the real pages, I performed my tests on my local computer, which is a 5-year old Athlon XP 3000+ with 1.25GB RAM on Win XP SP3. I don't think I would be able to do it well on the live server which is some flavour of Unix. Here are some test parameters to be aware of:

1. I tested two sites and the only difference between one and the other was the version of Smarty used. One was ver. 2.6.19 and the other one ver. 3 revision 3467 from 2010-01-25. Today I ran some tests on the newest revision from 2010-02-07 but the results were almost identical.

2. PHP 5.2.4 as Apache module. The columns with "EA" refer to tests with eAccellerator enabled (ver. 0.9.5)

3. Time was measured from PHP itself from the beginning of a script (everything goes through a common index.php) to the very end of it. Time spent sending data to the browser was not taken into account because ob_start('gz_handler') was used, so the sending of data occurred after all page generation. "All page generation" include all scripts that generate a single HTML page together with database access. No SQL cache was used.

4. Caching was off and compile check was on. The only cached portion of the site was the left menu with links, the caching was done by an external utility - we can assume the whole menu was injected to smarty as plain html data from a cache file.

5. Each page was reloaded 10 times and the average is given below. Loading each page for the first time was not measured (it is definitely longer since files and other data are not yet cached by the system and PHP).

6. At the bottom I presented memory usage results (for the home page only). They seem to be consistent for each page request. I don't know how much we can rely on these PHP functions but I present them nevertheless. These functions were called at the end of the script.

Ok, so here are the results:

mohrt · Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 2:09 pm Post subject:

FYI the latest SVN code sweeps have eliminated much of the magic methods.

Lemon Juice · Smarty Pro Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 109

Yes, I saw there fewer lazy loaded methods but the __call method itself became heavier instead. Anyway, it looks like this is negligible in a complex site like this because calling a magic method 2 or 3 times during the script execution is nothing compared to all the rest of the code needed to run the site, so I think we shouldn't be worried about performance here. But the other reason I am not fond of too much magic is because in IDE editors you can't quickly navigate to a given method because the method doesn't really exist, it's hidden behind some magic. It is useful to be able to quickly jump to a method to see it's implementation, parameters, docs in comments, etc. instead of having to search documentation.

mohrt · Posted: Mon Feb 08, 2010 5:36 pm Post subject:

At this point, the only thing __call() is used for is magic setter/getter methods and the Smarty 2 BC wrapper. I think using __call() for magic setters/getters is a fair compromise to hard coding all of these in the object. The overhead is negligible, and they all perform the same tasks.

falco · Smarty n00b Joined: 17 Feb 2010 Posts: 3

For what it's worth, I dropped the latest Smarty3-b7 on my production server and ran some quick benchmarks. The server is already optimised for highest performance (services around 2-300 apache hits per second), so all caching is enabled.

Smarty cache was cleaned between version shifts and the target page was loaded once to rebuild the smarty cached version of that page. Therefore please note that this is a benchmark of fully cached performance, not compile times.

The target page was chosen as it is likely one of the most complex templates that is used on the site. Contains a few loops over datasets and conditionals inside those loops, as well as an included header and footer.

php: PHP 5.3.1-4 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Feb 11 2010 17:23:59)
EA: eAccelerator v0.9.6

ab -kc1 -t100 (1 thread running over 100 seconds)

Smarty 2.6.16

Aryos · Smarty Rookie Joined: 12 Jan 2010 Posts: 8

I can verify your results. After testing with complex code and tens of files, I have seen a decrease of about 35% up to 50% in memory usage on the latest SVN version, compared to the last beta (beta 7) released, which is is quite impressive.
Execution time benefits, compared to Smarty 2 range from 5% to 15% in the best case.

Do we have an estimated ETA for this release. After going through the code it seems mature enough now, perhaps there's still some space for tweaking for more speed and on security but I have not noticed any worth-mentioned bugs so far. An update from the developers would be nice to have.

mohrt · Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 3:45 pm Post subject:

No ETA yet, we are still doing some code optimization/organization changes. We figured its best to get this complete before making an official release.

chefuri · Smarty n00b Joined: 09 May 2010 Posts: 3

Hello. In my case the results was bad.

ab -kc1 -t100 (1 thread running over 100 seconds)

Smarty 2.6.16
Code:
Requests per second: 73.85 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 13.540 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 13.540 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

Smarty 3 rc1
Code:
Requests per second: 49.09 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 20.371 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 20.371 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)

The code is the same (only change is_cached by isCached). And with this options:

caching = 1
compile_check = false

I use this fuctions: